I was traversing as I always do through Columbus Circle earlier this evening and something caught my attention and held it. This NYC smoking ban is a farce. If anything it’s really just something to keep the non-smokers at bay. It has bugged the heck out of me that no one is enforcing this “law.”
I approached her and asked, “Excuse me officer, isn’t smoking illegal in public plazas like Columbus Circle?” I motioned around to the scores of elderly, young children, and families laughing and playing smoke free.
As though caught on candid camera her right hand cradled the cigarette. “I don’t know,” she offered, “is it?”
I informed her that Columbus Circle was as much a pedestrian plaza as anywhere else.
She then tried reasoning with me: “Why does my smoking offend you?”
I said that it did not but that I was more curious about why no one was enforcing these laws.
“Well that [smoking] is nothing I’d ever give anyone a citation for,” she said. When I asked her why no one was bothering to enforce these rules, she drew an uneasy parallel: “It’s kind of like talking on your cell phone while driving,” she said.
“Is it, really?” I asked. “Isn’t driving a car a little bit different because you’re, you know, operating a vehicle?”
“I mean, I do it!” she offered; allowing that her control of her cell phone and her vehicle were better or smarter than the laws of the state. Then she reiterated, “I would never give someone a summons for that.”
I thanked her for her time and went on my way. I found an article from May which answered my questions about the grey area for smoking enforcement. Smoking rule enforcement isn’t up to the police; it has been designated to “some 200 parks personnel who watch over the city’s 29,000 acres of park land and beaches.”
So you’ve got 8 million residents in addition to countless tourists, commuters, uncounted vagrants, and dignitaries all hunkering down to this island full of pedestrian plazas and people en masse, trying to decipher the laws which only 200 are enforcing. Well that’s just great. And of course these few people are trying to police some thirty thousand acres of parks and beaches; does that even include pedestrian plazas like Times Square, Union Square, Herald Square or Columbus Circle?
It’s no wonder we can’t get uniform enforcement when uniformed officers are among those breaking the rules!
Source:
http://photoblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/05/23/6702296-new-york-park-smoking-ban-takes-effect